Auction Industry

Eva Jospin: The Call of the Forest in Contemporary Times

By La Gazette Drouot

Published on Nov 24, 24

Eva Jospin, a key figure in the art world, arrives at auction with one of her iconic works: a monumental forest of cardboard, her material of choice.

Eva Jospin (born 1975), Forest, 2014, collage of cut and reworked cardboard mounted on a wooden frame of five numbered panels, 2.80 x 4.50 m/9.18 x 14.76 feet.
Starting price: €40,000 — **Eva Jospin** (born 1975), *Forest*, 2014, collage of cut and reworked cardboard mounted on a wooden frame of five numbered panels, 2.80 x 4.50 m/9.18 x 14.76 feet.
Starting price: €40,000

The visual artist seems to be everywhere at once with a packed schedule. This summer, she unveiled Chambre de soie (“Silk Room”), a monumental 350m2 embroidery in the Orangery at the Palace of Versailles, followed by the inauguration of a work in Ruinart’s new sculpture garden in Reims after the champagne-maker gave her carte blanche last year for its limited edition. The “Selva” exhibition is open until November 24 at the Fortuny Musem in parallel with the 60th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. In 2023, she won the “Femmes de la culture” award and was made an Officière de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Lastly, this autumn she arrives on the art market with a monumental forest, a special commission received in 2013 from property developer Ogic for its Boulogne-Billancourt headquarters. Ms. Jospin’s appearance at an auction will undoubtedly cause quite a stir, as it is still a rare event. La Gazette’s website lists only three results and Artnet’s just four. On June 28, Thierry de Maigret sold a forest at Drouot acquired in 2014 from the Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery in Paris. Although relatively small — 148 x 100 cm/58.26 x 39.37 in — it fetched €92,736. How high will bidders go this time?

An Ode to Slowness by Eva Jospin

On a visit to her studio, Ms. Jospin told us how good she felt there, as if swept along by a wave of creative energy. With help from an all-female team and machines that are usually associated with men — jigsaws, millers and cutters — she breathes life into a lowly, commonplace material that has been forgotten in the history of art: cardboard. She likes “the fact that it’s not a respected material. You can rip it up, start all over again and at the same time use a constraint to invent.” Cheap, plentiful, easily available and already recycled, there is nothing special about it. But in the 20th century, codes were broken and the door was opened to all shapes and materials. So cardboard, which is made from trees — there are rarely coincidences — was turned into monumental landscapes, caves from the depths of time, reinterpreted follies and deep forests. Ms. Jospin’s repetitive work is a kind of ode to slowness carried out in successive, built-up layers to create three-dimensional forms. The cardboard is cut up, trimmed and glued until trunks, branches, leaves and finally a whole lifelike forest emerges with corrugated edges forming a texture similar to tree bark and a color recalling wood. The only thing left is to take a walk inside the dense creation. The artist says her work is an invitation to shift the gaze: “It has not one side, but many.” There is never a human or animal presence in her creations. It is the viewer who silently wanders through them.

Into the Woods

For over a decade, Ms. Jospin has turned her fabulous, dreamlike worlds into Palladian architecture, such as the amazing 2016 Panorama in the Louvre’s Cour Carrée echoing the museum’s exhibition “Hubert Robert, A Visionary Painter” while building 18th-century-inspired follies or a majestic cenotaph in Montmajour Abbey’s minimalist volumes during the summer of 2020. She has assembled her dark forests, cut with tremendous precision, since 2009 and thinks she will never tire of them. They are what thrust her to the forefront of the art world. Many remember her installation for the Beaupassage access bottleneck on boulevard Raspail in Paris. Since then, the forest has been a central, if not recurring theme in her work. Ms. Jospin makes no claims to being an environmental artist. In her view, art should spark debate without being the main agent of change. However, the forest theme allows her to question our relationship with nature. She draws inspiration not only from her past, but also from the ideas conjured up by forests, which are safe havens, mysteries and the setting for many of our childhood fairy tales. Mixing mythical forests with those found in literature, she takes us into a world conducive to meditation, the search for knowledge and escape from the stress of everyday life, creating a fragile “ecosystem” that must not be touched other than with the eye.